The Rawlsian Case for Class Stratification
Chapter 14 of The Information Class
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Now let's turn to Rawls, the lion of late 20th-century secular liberal political philosophy. What assessment of class stratification can we derive from his philosophy?
Rawls’ theory of justice centers around two famous ideas: the veil of ignorance, and the difference principle.
The veil of ignorance is the idea that the way to discern justice is to imagine yourself behind a veil of ignorance about what role you will occupy in society, and then think how you would want society to be arranged, knowing that you might occupy any position, even the lowest. If society makes a few princes perfectly happy by oppressing the rest into working for them with no rights and little pay, you might be tempted to try to be one of these princes, but your greed would be checked by the consideration that you'd be more likely to land in misery as an oppressed serf.
The difference principle is the idea that the most just societal order is that which maximizes the well-being of the least well-off. To assess any potential social order, try to foresee who in it would be least happy. Then compare them. Whichever society has the best-off worst-off member is the most just.
This is supposed to follow from the veil of ignorance, because a person behind the veil of ignorance would supposedly choose the society that satisfies the difference principle. It's not clear why. Why be so risk-averse? Might you not run a risk of a little more misery for the chance of much greater flourishing? But never mind. Rawls' extreme assumption is useful because it sets a limit on the demands that egalitarianism can plausibly make.
John Rawls is not my favorite political philosopher. But I like the way his thought provides a kind of firebreak against excessive advocacy of equality. His theory of justice can function as a platform from which to launch reductio ad absurdum arguments against extreme egalitarians, since after a certain point, more equality hurts even the worst off. Sometimes letting the rich help themselves is the best way to help the poor.
A Rawlsian must not disdain trickle-down effects. Consistent application of the Rawlsian philosophy requires that the benefits which accrue to the poor as side-effects of the enrichment of the rich inform the assessment of social justice. If a change increases overall inequality, whether of outcomes or opportunity, but would make the worst-off better off through trickle-down effects, a Rawlsian is required to endorse it.
But by now we know one reason why class stratification might help the worst-off, namely, that by giving some people a headstart on the path to productive specialization and the pursuit of excellence, it can contribute to overall excellence and productivity, creativity and progress, giving society more resources to support general cultural flourishing, public welfare or philanthropy, or simply to fuel more demand and higher wages for unskilled workers.
We can add other, overlapping reasons to make the case overwhelming.
First, income inequality, which as we have seen is not the same as class stratification but is causally related in both directions, heightens the incentive to work, save, get educated, and innovate.
Second, a class whose wealth puts it above the need to work naturally assumes a variety of other pro-social functions, such as patronage of the arts and sciences, investment in innovative companies, and high-level political influencing from a perspective informed by the leisure to think of a better world.
Third, the rich drive innovation from the demand side, serving as helpful early adopters of new products that begin as expensive luxuries, but which then tend to become cheaper through learning-by-doing and economies of scale in production, until the products become affordable to, and get incorporated into the rising living standards of, the broad masses.
These benefits of class stratification probably help explain why the most flourishingly innovative societies in history all seem to be class-stratified. Ancient democratic Athens had its aristocratic families, somewhat eclipsed by the revolution that created the famous Athenian democracy, but still active. Plato was one of their scions, as was Pericles, who led Athens during the peak of its prosperity and genius. Rome had its senatorial aristocracy, as well as a subordinate “equestrian” class– the term derives from the Latin word for “horse” and is sometimes translated “knights”– which were still decidedly superior to the “plebeians” or common people. It's not clear whether a Rawlsian should prefer classical Greco-Roman civilization to other historic societies. The worst-off in those mass slavery societies were about as miserable as can be imagined. But the brilliance of Athens and Rome deserves some credit, and by providing templates of rule of law and political representation, helped open the way to care for the poor later on.
If we're comparing class stratification with equality of opportunity, we must also consider that equality of opportunity can be pretty harsh for the least fortunate, because they tend to be the ones who had better opportunities but failed to realize them, through not quite enough effort, or aptitude, or maybe just bad luck. They're still stuck at the bottom, but they spent some effort and hope trying to do better.
In a society characterized by strong class stratification, people of disadvantaged classes tend to know from the start that certain educational and occupational options are out of reach for them. But it does not follow that the remaining options which still are available need be unappealing. It can be better to have a few good options, than to have a lot of miserable options along with a few glittering possibilities which are extremely competitive and probably can't be attained. This is especially true for the worst-off, who are often poor decision makers and would benefit from a bit of non-coercive paternalism. Some would say it's just for people who made poor decisions to end up at the bottom. I would retort that our society presents people with a baffling obstacle course of hard, unfamiliar decisions, and provides people with little or no good guidance on how to make them. But in any case, such notions of justice have nothing to do with Rawls. It's not really in the spirit of Rawls to ask if the worst-off deserve it. Just try to arrange things to help them.
At bottom, the difference between class stratification and equality of opportunity lies in the official and practical answers to the question: How does society assign people to social roles? But it turns out that every practical answer to that question is incompatible with equality of opportunity. Equality of opportunity isn't really attainable at all, and the pursuit of it is often adverse to any notion of the common good, and especially to the Rawlsian notion of the common good as the best-off state for the worst-off.
Thus, it's smart, of course, to allocate jobs on the basis of talent, as one factor. But in one sense, that's incompatible with equality of opportunity, for talent isn't equally distributed. And efforts and preferences ought to be taken into account as well. Where does leave equality of opportunity? Maybe some attempt to save it and make sense of it, using the wage to help balance talent, effort, and preferences, would be possible. But social networks and serendipity play a part as well. And to accept that clear-headedly is to leave equality of opportunity high and dry. There are a lot of opportunities you won't have, because you don't know the right people, or you just weren't in the right place at the right time.
Cutting deeper, decisions about the cultivation of talent must often occur before the degree of talent is known. Parental home environment is a factor in the opportunities you get. It affects it through all channels: talent, effort, preferences, social networks, and those chances that open doors, too. What can be done? Clearly, we don't want to make talent matter less. Or effort, or preferences. But it's just as harmful to suppress social networks functioning as vectors of opportunity. The job search literature, and lots of business experience, finds that the best job matches are catalyzed through people you know at first- or secondhand. Formal processes relying wholly on advertisements and resumes and interviews don't work as well. And serendipity is often the key to creativity.
Class, in passing on natural talent and shaping how it is developed, in affecting decisions before the age of accountability, in conferring inside knowledge and wisdom about career paths, in connecting people with opportunities, and so forth, simultaneously enriches the economy, culture, and society, and also checkmates equality of opportunity. Chance and birth and natural differences make people's opportunity sets comprehensively different.
It is possible, in a sense, to get closer to equality of opportunity. It involves a mix of education, conformism, and formalization of labor markets: education to prepare people for a wide variety of opportunities; conformism to limit the variety of opportunities in society at large so that the set is more manageable for the education system to bring within reach; and formalization of labor markets so that hiring is done through official, neutral, public channels. None of that serves the interests either of economic dynamism, of community, of a diverse, spontaneous and fun society, or of Rawls’ worst-off, who are poor at navigating impersonal systems and can ill afford to waste scarce mental resources on acquiring knowledge they won't use that only serves to satisfy the civic demands of equality of opportunity by making them plausible candidates, on paper, for jobs they'll never get. Equality of opportunity is unattainable, and policies that lean that way will often be counterproductive for society's general welfare and for the worst-off in particular.
By contrast, class stratification has much to recommend it. Education and career preparation are major societal costs. A lot of time and resources are dedicated to them. The trend has been to dedicate more and more, and this is a major factor in the greater prosperity of modern societies in the West, relative to societies in the past and most societies in the rest of the world. Education has an enormous impact on the subsequent course of people's lives, affecting both their happiness and their usefulness. But education cannot be determined by the informed adult choices of the person being educated, because much of it needs to take place in early youth, well before the age of accountability. Someone, parents or church or class or state, must to a large extent make these decisions for children and teenagers. Class is well-adapted to the job.
Education should, moreover, be differentiated, because society needs not a single skill set but a wide variety of different skill sets. As we have seen, a certain moral differentiation is also needed if people are to achieve the distinctive ethos and professionalism characteristic of different callings. Again, that's just the kind of job that class does well.
The importance of early preparation will depend on the professional destination. No doubt there are many jobs which people can do equally well regardless of how they used the first 18 or 20 years of their lives. Maybe these people don't need a class. Indeed, part of understanding class is understanding its limits, and just as there are stateless persons, it stands to reason there are classless persons, in whom the input to personal formation which in others is provided by class is simply absent. One way to understand the trick at the heart of the thought of Marx is that he chose to make a class of the classless, to project his own ideological fantasies in romanticizing a set of people who had nothing in common but privation. Peasants have their traditions, but proletarians were, alas, culturally impoverished enough, and sufficiently destitute of traditions, to be recruited as the pawns of the megalomaniacal intelligentsia that produced Bolshevism.
Meanwhile, in many other jobs, preparation much earlier than adulthood is valuable or even essential. In particular, all educated professions depend heavily on skills that are normally acquired in early childhood.
There are trade-offs between constantly studying, on the one hand, and making friends or having fun or acquiring domestic skills, on the other. If you want to have some of the elite philosophers and historians and scientists and mathematicians who do so much to enrich civilization and advance progress, it's helpful if some children are intensely dedicated to study. But for all children to be intensely dedicated to study would be not only sad but rather wasteful. Some will never have the aptitude for a learned career. Some wouldn't like it. And there are a lot of other jobs that society needs done. Other vocations, like warrior or farmer or priest, may also benefit from early preparation. But under class stratification, the worst-off can relax a bit.
The Rawlsian case for class stratification starts from the commonsense conclusion that it's beneficial if children are differentiated by education early in life. It's not absolutely essential. People can, to some extent, do the work of getting fully specialized by education after they become adults. And there are downsides to early specialization, because children who were painstakingly prepared for a career may prove to be unsuited for it, by aptitude or preference or character. But on average, you'll get better elites, cognitively and morally, if you train them young, while non-elites are happier if you don't encourage or force them to work hard learning things they'll never use. Rawls’ worst-off are better served by noblesse oblige than equality of opportunity.
And if you want educational differentiation among children, how do you decide how to educate whom? Children's preferences should surely be a factor to at least some extent. How could they not be? And they're probably at least a little bit indicative of adult preference. Children's observed talents should be a factor, too. But it makes sense to give some weight, probably a lot of weight, to who the parents are and what they do. Children are likely to resemble parents in their talents and preferences, due to both nature and nurture factors. So on average, raising the children of the successful to be part of their parents’ class is a good investment for society.
Intergenerational similarity of occupation contributes to family solidarity, and enables parents to help more by their advice and their networks. Children can get the benefit of piggybacking on their parents’ reputations, while parents get the satisfaction of seeing their life work continued. At the same time, you don't want to lock children into a narrow occupational niche. So the best thing to do is probably to look upstream on the ramifying specialization tree to some more generalized learning and acculturation template, which can then branch off into many different productive occupations that are still reasonably similar to that of the parents. For a certain class of people, college fits the bill very nicely.
It would be hard to prove, empirically, that early educational differentiation makes societies more productive and prosperous and free, because one can't run controlled experiments on whole societies. Contemporary social scientists have a strong tendency to be like the man in the joke who lost his keys, and who looks for them under the streetlamp because the light’s better there, although he lost them in the bushes. The empirical emphasis of the social sciences is imaginatively stunting and drives too much of a focus on questions for which strong data is available, though they may be of limited interest, and to be artificially ignorant about all else, or worse, to cling to unexamined prejudices. The solution is to trust theory more, and to know a little history and not be afraid to interpret it. Just so, we can see in theory why class stratification is helpful, and why history is full of thriving class-stratified societies.
Still, while I don't want to pretend to be more agnostic than I am, I don't need to prove that class-stratified societies are more thriving in general than societies lacking in class differentiation and dedicated to equality of opportunity. It's enough at this stage to have a proof of concept. If we understand why class stratification can be conducive to the common good, and in particular to the Rawlsian desideratum of maximizing the well-being of the worst-off, then we can take a closer look at contemporary society to see if it's an example of a society in which class stratification is a force for good.
In brief, if you were behind the veil of ignorance, concerned only to minimize your risk of misery, what kind of society would you choose? Not a society constantly fussing over equality of opportunity and meddling with the economy in pursuit of it, creating red tape for business, that overeducates a lot of people destined to be manual workers, often by luring them with false promises while putting them into crippling debt, and meanwhile wastes the time of future elites making them jump through hoops in ways that impoverish what they have to give, and leaves them a little embittered and eager to escape their less talented fellows who have been continually wasting their time and holding them back. Rather, you'd likely choose a society that trains its elites well, empowers them to be productive and beneficent, and inculcates in them a strong sense of duty to the less fortunate, of noblesse oblige.
There, if you're unlucky, you'd still live in the midst of an opulent and progressive economy, with use even for the poorly endowed, and with good masters to admire, who, if you connect with them, will benevolently oversee your life, and help you at need.